Painting with the wind
by Psyche Blue
Summary: A series of one shots following the second film, exploring the lives of John Smith and Pocahontas. Like the film, it is loosely based on historical events.
1. Chapter 1

She is happy. Yes. Happy, happy as she never thought she would be, living among the white people, in a thatched house, with an ordered garden, tamed chickens, a cross hanging on the wall, lest they forget the god impaled for their sins.

She has her baby. He's nice and heavy in her arms – demands her to slow her pace. The white women tell her to leave him when he cries, but some memory of women walking with their babies on their backs makes her pick him up. John allows it – smiles indulgently at the native woman and her odd ways. He's often away all day, supervising the tobacco plantation, meeting with traders, and so Rebecca walks to the town. She buys eggs and flour and kneads and molds bread into being, stirs soup in copper pots, scrubs the floors and washes the linen white. Thomas gets left in his cradle when he sleeps, but her ears are always alert. Always listening. She talks and gossips with the women in the town – they are used to her, now, have accepted her, smile when she goes to church – see. See, they say. We can exist along side them. How easily they can be tamed.

And Rebecca smiles and bows her head, keeps her eyes downcast and her voice soft, in obedience to the holy book, which commands she obey her husband and his God.

And she is happy. She kisses John in front of the fire, occasionally sits with Thomas in her arms in her garden, with its imported, docile flowers. There is never any dirt under her fingernails. Sometimes wild things come to the door – a wretched, filthy raccoon, which she fends away with a broom, an annoying buzz of a hummingbird. They hiss at her, implore her to remember, but she has found her place now. Her place inside firm walls, straight paths, soft talk and a thousand identical stiches.

Even so.

Sometime she sits with her son in the garden. Sometimes she holds him to her chest feels their hearts beat as one. Takes off her shoes and stockings, digs her toes into the soil, feels the earth thrum along side their pounding hunks of flesh. Stands and shakes her hair loose from pins and ribbons. Shuts her eyes.

She lets the wind paint out a world in different shades.


	2. Chapter 2

He used to be lonely – well, he's not anymore, is he? This little thing. Scrap of life – shock of blond hair, and eyes too brown, almost – great large things, they are. She cries as though her heart is breaking, though. He's got a wetnurse for the little scrap – his daughter, his child, born of her Russian mother who saved him, then snatched from her mother's husband, the man with the greedy eyes.

That creature will never touch his little girl.

Hush, hushabye baby. He's never really loved till now.

And soon she's big enough to eat solid food – and he takes her on the ship, because he must keep moving, and the crew are handpicked, so they love her. Someone watches her at all times. She can sing shanties before she can talk, knows the name of every sea bird before she can spell her name. This little thing, with the broken eyes, she learns to play the fiddle, climb the rigging, holds out her arms to the wind and laughs.

One day, when she's eight, she runs her finger is the air, and his heart breaks when she says she's painting with it.

Her mother's dead, of course. And the marquis who was her mother's husband will come looking for her, too, if John isn't careful.

But he's always careful.

She dances on the decks, smells a thousand spices in oriental ports, learns to paint in Paris, Philosophize in Germany. She has her first kiss in an Italian port, breath steeped in burgundy, rides a barge down the Nile, sees rainbow painted birds on the Ivory coast. She shoots a man when she is twelve, kisses one when she is fifteen, and tries to kill herself when she is ten.

And thirteen.

Then he settles back in England, but no more does she attempt the leap of faith into deep blue sea – now it's the violent scarlet slash, whenever she's left unattended, so it's back to the sea, again, him and his little heart beat, the only thing he has left to love.

She has her mother's eyes and her screaming, hysteric madness, too.

But she is his daughter. She flirts with the sailors, runs wild when they reach new land, has eyes that want to taste the world.

He and his daughter – John Smith and his little Meg – they are things of the sea and sky and salt. They have saved each other.

And on they go – always moving with the wind.


	3. Chapter 3

Thomas is eighteen years old. He can speak English, French, and, read some words of Latin. He will one day inherit his father's plantation. For all his dark skin and darker hair, the girls in the town whisper over his strong arms and the way he feels most comfortable in the trees, barefoot in the forest where his mother's family live. But he doesn't care much for them. Their words are too limited – the walls of the houses in the town are too constrictive, and he likes to feel soil beneath his feet. His mother used to come with him – when he was thirteen he went out without telling her, and when he came back she was nervous, agitated, shouted at him for worrying her so. So for a time she would step into the forest with him. She never took him to see her family, never climbed trees beside him, and she only stared at the old raccoon, the wild dog and the weak hummingbird who found him out and raced around him. But she took off her shoes and smiled to herself, and was happier than he had ever seen her before.

That is, until his father came home earlier than expected, saw them returning, clutching berries between their fingers, and looked as though his heart was breaking. As though he had lost them.

So now Thomas goes out alone, and the town girls whisper, with their curled hair and pink cheeks, about the tamed savage of a boy who has an easy smile and a friendly laugh, who shuts his eyes when the wind blows, as though to draw prussian, vermillion, saffron shades from the gussets of air.

Sometimes he could almost swear he hears words, calling to him. But he can never find where they come from – perhaps there is too much of his father, who is polite and godly, within him.

So he will come back, wash the leaves from his feet, sit with the bible by a window, and try not to notice the ghost of wilderness within his mother's eyes.


	4. Chapter 4

Storms! She loves storms – they are the best sea-change, they are the wind that finally makes you feel alive – she laughs as a wave almost swamps her, for all the other sailors scowl and tremble their way through the windbreakrain racket of the sea.

_Get below_ he father shouts, but she is here, she is useful, pulling ropes, slip sliding across the deck, skin shinning up the rigging to undo a knotted sail. The wind grates across her face, the pelting rain takes chunks from her cheeks – yes, this is it, this is true freedom, at last this is what she wants!

Slate grey, Prussian blue, a kind of bruising purple – the wind whips up an artist's palette, blurred all over by the charcoal smudge of midnight rain. Whee! A crack of lightening shakes the sky, glows mercury for a moment, leaves a shock behind her eyes.

_Now. Below, Meg._

She ignores him, she is needed. Then, his hand on her arm, his frantic eyes slowing the joyful pound of her heart.

_Elizabeth Meg Smith, you get below deck now. _

So Elizabeth Meg Smith hurkles her way below the deck, pouting, and goes to her cabin, where she sits in the dark. Soon, she begins to grin with the plummeting of the boat – up down up down –

_As once upon a time a girl grinned at the fall and flip of her canoe, at the waterfall leap into blue – but that is enough, that is another time, and the people who lived then are dead – _

In the morning the only casualty is the boat, and Meg's violin. She goes to fix it on the salt scrubbed deck, leaning against the side and watching a gull wheel in the parted clouds. In the distance, founts of light fall in slanting beams, cutting clear through the sea mist and filling the air with the colour of heaven.

He father is worried about the ship. They will have to land, he says, they will have to pitch anchor in the closest port, repair the ship, it could take mounths.

And the next he says with a kind of heavy sadness in his slate blue eyes, an expression so lost that Meg pulls herself to her feet and wraps her arms around him, listens to his heart, knows that it is breaking.

_The closest place, if I am right, is Jamestown. _


	5. Chapter 5

Rebecca sometimes forgets that she once had another name. There are lines at the corners of her eyes, now, and the skin of her hands is dry and rough in places. The tips of her fingers are used to stitches in linen and wool, have forgotten what it feels like to touch rough bark, to skim through water, to hold the paddle of a canoe between them.

_Mother, I'm going out._

_Be careful, Thomas_. Fear for her boy grates suddenly at her heart – these woods are dangerous, there are wolves between the trees he will insist on climbing, there are waterfalls that are oh so easy to slip and slide and plummet off, there is the wind which whispers in your ears, calls to you, begs you to remember. Once upon a time, of course, there was a willow tree with whispers of leaves, pale green, a silent river in midnight blue, otters and eagles and sycamore trees and a man with eyes the color of the sky…

But enough.

She looks down at her sewing. The stitches have been ripped out.


	6. Chapter 6

The wind is changing. Thomas can hear it in the trees. There's that song – that odd, off song – it's louder, now, he can hear it clearer than he ever has before. The wind is singing to him.

He moves silently between the trees.

Soon, the fluting notes of the breeze are interweaving – interlocking. There is something else – there is another sound. Of water, of – of another sound. A kind of haunting strain. In the shadows, his eyes are dark, and the rough fabric of his shirt blends into the shadings of the forest, as he creeps towards the water, and looks between the leaves.

There is a girl sitting in the middle of the river.

She has blond hair glinting with gold, pale skin, and she's wearing a rough skirt and jacket over a grey shirt.

And she is playing the violin. The sound reaches up through the race of the river – it tugs at some elemental tendon of his heart, a memory woven into blood, into bone. Perhaps the lingering tune his mother sung, before she knew his father, before she lost the ability to make a painting out of the wind.

He moves closer.

The girl's lips are puled down in a frown with concentration, her eyes closed, and the violin is a little out of tune, damaged in places, worn away at.

He finds he cannot breathe.

A twig cracks.

The moment breaks, the girl drops the violent – it clashes disjointed in the air, and picks up a gun he has not seen, pointing it directly at him.

_Show yourself!_ She shouts it, fingers trembling. Thomas shrinks back, suddenly afraid, and she makes to shoot. _Show yourself or I swear I'll – _

He steps out of the shadows.

_I mean you no harm _he says


	7. Chapter 7

She doesn't believe him. She's a young girl alone in a foreign country. She's lied to her father – said she was going back to the room they've rented, leaving him to discuss the rebuilding of the ship – but she'd snuck away, violin and her father's gun on her back, lost herself for a blissful moment in the breathbreaking beauty of this country caught in wilderness. It has a song – it has colors in the air – and if someone tries to hurt her there is no one to stop them. And he is a young man – he looks strong, half wild, his feet are bare and she is very much afraid, so afraid that her fingers tremble on the trigger –

And then there is a voice of wind. A kind of melody. They turn their heads, it sings to them both, and then Meg turns back to look at the boy. His hands are gentle. His eyes are dark and seem to strip away all her outer fears, all her tilted arrogance, as though he can see –

Something.

Slowly, she lowers the gun.

_My name is Thomas Rolfe. _ So polite. So gentle. As though he is afraid she'll shoot or run or dive into the violence of the water.

_I'm Meg. _


	8. Chapter 8

He had hoped to never see this world again. He knew it would be like this – it would make him want to shut his eyes for all it's brutal, savage loveliness, all the memories knitted up into the soil, the very air itself, that poignant darkness in between the trees. And now it's eaten up his daughter. His Meg.

John Smith is running frantically through the town – and someone says they saw her, hours ago, disappearing into the trees – and into the forest her runs, for all the sun is screaming scarlet across the sky, and melting into night, for all there are wolves, bears, teeth between the trees he does not think will remember how he once walked her, a with a woman who wore feathers about her neck, and leaves in her hair –

There. Between the shadows. A head of gold, a lilting laugh – his Meg and someone else but he does not consider them, races to her, takes her in his arms and wants to shout but –

Can't.

_Don't ever scare me like that again_.

_Dad, it's fine. _

_Someone could have hurt you. _

_No one hurt me. see – I made a friend – Dad, meet Thomas. _ The boy extends his hand to be shaken.

_A friend? _

_A friend, Dad. _

John looks the young man in the eyes. He stares back.

_You look Indian. _

_My mother is, sir. _

_Your mother – what is her name? _ He is surprised at how forcefully he asks the words. And even more surprised at the relief which flood into his heart, to learn his mother's name is Rebecca. A taken name, of course, but he cannot imagine the woman he once knew surrendering her name so easily, accepting baptism, allowing herself to be twisted into another culture's narrative. No. that woman, he thinks, as he snatches back his gun and glares at his guiltily blushing daughter, was wild as the wind, and far more free. The type of girl who dove off waterfalls for fun, and claimed to listen to the mountains themselves.

He does not know what he would do, if he saw that woman.

Does not know if he could bear it.


	9. Chapter 9

Meg brings a map with her, this time, this most recent of many.

_The ship's going to be another two months, at least _she tells Tom, as they sit beside the river. _It's been four weeks – it must have been absolutely wrecked. _She laughs as she says it, as though destruction is a spectacle for amusement, then spreads out the map for him to view.

She's shaded in in red all the places where she's been.

_You've gone to China?_

_Yes. Oh, I wish I could take you there. The smells! They sold paper fans in the market. Dad brought me one, but I broke it when I had one of my moments. And the women had tiny feet – they break them, when they're babies, so they grow deformed. _

_That's disgusting. _

_So are stays and laces and lead face powder which turns your fingernails blue. Look here – I want to go here. _

_Russia? _

_I've never been. _

_Why would you want to go there? It's all ice and snow and-_

_I was born there. _

Thomas looks at her in confusion, his head tilted on one side.

_I thought your father was English. _

_My mother wasn't. _ Thomas looks at the map, then at the smiling girl. She's not like the girls of the town – she climbs trees and plays her violin in their branches, walks with bare feet in the mud, hitches up her skirt to above her thighs, so he looks away, his father's morals woven into his eyes, which cannot stand the sight of such impropriety. She will not wear stays, eats in great mouthfuls – he's even see her get drunk. Her face is strong, and her eyes a brown so deep he finds it hard to look anywhere but them.

_Tell me. _

She raises her eye-brows.

There is something unhinged within her, too. She sometimes talks too fast or looks too long. It frightens him.

She clears her throat, and begins:

My father, once upon a time, suffered that ironic malady of a broken heart. The non physical wound which strips you of everything you are. Perhaps possessed by a kind of madness, he joined the war for Dutch independence against the Spanish, then moved from war to war. I'll never know what made him do so – he served as an officer, a pirate, a spectator, watched so many wars he must have felt sick with it. As though he was about to burst from it. He said, he used to taste blood when he went to sleep, used to dream of it, see their faces, see the shadows and the dark.

He still has nightmares, sometimes.

But he didn't stop. Then he went to fight the Turks, and killed their generals, cut their heads off in the battlefield, slaughtered the foot soldiers – fought like a man broken, a man lost, possessed (at least, this is what his brothers in arms have told me, when I've met them).

And then he stopped. Right in the battle field, he stopped – and he said its because for a moment he felt the wind on his face. Just the wind. It seemed to strip away all that frightful wash of red, the grate of steel, the throat croaked screams, the whimpers of the boys who were too young to fight. The wind came and brought with it a memory.

He knelt in the blood, and put down his sword, and closed the eyes of the man he had just slaughtered, and realized just how savage they all were.

So the Turks captured him, and they were all sold as slaves 'like beasts in a market.'

And this is where my mother comes in.

Dad saw her in the crowd. He says it was hot – too hot, so hot he could barely breathe. He says she had black hair, very straight, and he could not see her face, because she wore a kind of veil. For a moment, he thought she was someone else, and he shouted a name.

Well, she wasn't the woman he thought she was, but she turned around even so, and saw him, and brought him too.

This was in Constantinople, where she was visiting with her husband, a Marquis who was settling a rather large gambling debt. My mother, her name was Maria, like the Virgin Mary, and she took him with her back to Russia, the land where she lived, the land where she was born, leaving behind her husband in Constantinople.

I don't quite know if they fell in love. Perhaps, in the end, she was just very lonely, and so was he, and so it was more the clutching of two drowning people than any sort of heart wrenched passion.

So they fell in love, and her husband returned – a Marquis, or the Russian equivalent, not quite a prince but powerful, even so. When my mother grew pregnant he thought it was his. Paid no attention to my father, once slave now servant, overseer of peasants.

Until I was born. He suspected nothing until I grew a pale fuzz of blond hair, and he saw my father pick me up and hold me, and he realized what had happened.

He killed my mother, and would have killed me, as well, if my father had not fled (secreting enough sparkles of diamonds to buy a new ship and crew, and a wet nurse for yours truly).

And we've ben all over the world! I've seen things you can only dream about. I can speak four languages.

And – and we are still…

She breaks off, suddenly, looks away. They've both been caught up in the story, and now that there is silence he can hear the choir of birds above them, the rustle of the leaves around them.

_Still what? _ He asks. He catches her hand – it is rough, the nails are bitten away, it is so dry it bleeds.

_Running_ she whispers.

For a moment she trembles, is delicate, and he wants to take her in his arms and hold her.

But then she's wrenched her hand away, bundled up the paper map, and taken off between the trees, disappearing loudly, swallowed up by the forest.

Thomas stares at her for a moment.

Then he hears a calling.

And he goes to find his Mother, who tells him his father is home, wants him to come back, think she is irresponsible. Her eyes are very red, she has been weeping, and she rubs her hands together.

She shakes.


	10. Chapter 10

Rebecca has been dreaming about when she had another name. It's always the same dream- of rivers and a willow and throwing herself into the air, laying down her head upon _his _head, so her father, who is dead, will have to kill them both.

She woke to the tune of a half remembered song. But it's stopped now, dream music.

All the same. It's unsettled her. Tilted the world.

John is sound asleep beside her. She takes a moment to look at his face – clean shaven, with a patina of lines spread across his skin. He loves her so much. He let her keep her mother's necklace. He wanted her to save her people, when the man who never wrote just wanted her to save herself. He understands her. He does. And if he could not stand the forest, insisted upon the house, called it dirty when she let creatures in, called her mad with only half affection, brought her dresses and helped her lace her stays and said how lovely she looked when she tucked her hair away – well. This is all because he loves her so.

Yes, he does love her, she thinks, as she gets up from the bed and goes to the kitchen. He loves her so much that the thought she is not entirely his threatens, sometimes, to break his heart. So she made herself entirely his.

And there are no fights with the Indians, now, her marriage has seen to that, once and for all.

There is nothing with the Indians.

No. She is being unfair to him. He has not made her do anything – it was just the sadness in his eyes, the smile that was not quite full, the angry tightening in his jaw that made her change herself for him.

He taught her to read the bible, smiled with so much joy when she could that she kissed him. He works all day to provide for her, brings her gifts – a fan of lace, a dress of silk, a brightly coloured bird in a cage (that died within three days, unused to gilded walls). So she scrubs the floors and turns the pages of the holy book, and kisses her husband and holds him and if sometimes she has dreams…well… that is only sometimes.

And she loves her son. Loves her son more than she has ever loved anything in this world. John has given her her son, and for that she will love him until she dies.

She goes to the bucket of water to wash her face – but it is empty. She looks through the windows. The moonlight has washed the world silver, and the well stands just outside the door. Rebecca Rolfe picks up the bucket, goes outside.

It is so cold it chokes her, for a moment. Then she shakes it off, realizing her hair has unwound from it's plait, that the ground bites beneath her feet, and that the moonlight – the moonlight…

She drops the bucket.

There, there, off with the stockings, off with the awful tight clung cotton, leave them on the ground, they hardly matter, not when the moon is singing as it is. The wind – she can hear the wind! It's racing, it's turning through the trees, she wants to jump into it – she can breathe! All this time she's been suffocating – but now, now she can breathe!

The woman lifts her head to the sky. Tears run unbidden, frantic on her cheeks.

Slowly, slowly, at first, in her long white nightgown, she steps into the garden. Walks down the path. Shuts the gate behind her.

The path in front of her leads to the town. It is smooth. It is steady. Steady as a drum.

With something half between a laugh and a sob, Pocahontas leaps away from the path, and runs, muscles burning, heart leaping, eyes wide open (because she's been asleep, she's been dreaming all this time, surely, surely) into the trees. Her mother's necklace, and the cross John gave her at her baptism clink together. The cross is heavy, the necklace delicate – it will be damaged, so she rips away the wooden icon, hurls the crucifix to the ground, and runs until she thinks her lungs will bleed.

When she stops, she clutches a tree, and she laughs.

She laughs.

And there! That song – from her dream. Only it's not, it's real, unless this is a dream, but it doesn't feel like one. Slowly, she follows the sound.

She remembers. It twists her heart – brutalizes it. The force of the memory winds her, makes her eyes water again, she has to clutch her heart, it hurts so much.

The song is ripping it apart.

The native woman in the white dress walks slowly through the trees, trapped in a dream, pulled onwards by the winds. She climbs over rocks. She cuts the soft skin of her feet, her hands graze against the ground. She cannot stop the silent trickle of tears, and the overwhelming fear of freedom.

She knows this place. She knows this river. She's dreamed this path a thousand times.

The moonlight bathes the world, whispers to her, weeps. It sings alongside the melody.

Pocahontas stumbles towards the willow tree. Between the branches, she sees a figure. A head of blond hair, and she shouts _John. _

'John!' But it's a girl. A girl wearing a man's large white shirt and an old brown skirt. In the moonlight her hair gleams, and she stops the melody, turns to face the stranger, pushes back the fall of the willow tree's branches to look at the older woman.

They stare, for a moment.

'Are you a dream?' the young woman answers. For a moment, Pocahontas cannot speak. Then, she begins to laugh.

'Yes. Yes, I am, child, I'm a dream. I'm a dream.' I'm the dream of the white man, who wants an exotic, docile woman to save him. I'm the dream of a foreign nation, who wants a savage tamed. I'm the dream of a church, who wants all other gods subdued, forgotten, who wants all to embrace their monosyllabic God.

I'm the nightmare of a nation raped and beaten to the ground. I'm the fear of a father, who lost his child to his enemy. I'm the lingering, awful, shaking hallucination of my own mind, the woman who gave up who she was to prove she loved a man, that she had made the right choice, that she had not given up her heart.

I am nothing.

No. I am Rebecca.

The girl child steps down from the willow, and Rebecca sees a face momentarily surface from its knotted bark. But the white men killed that, too. Whether with gunshots or with love, they have killed it.

'Do you need help?'

'Who taught you that song?' Rebecca moves towards the child, clutches her arms, almost digs her nails in in her insistence.

'My father- who are you?'

'What is your fathers name? Tell me!'

'John. John Smith.' The girl whispers it, confused, but Rebecca lets her go, turns away, puts a hand over her mouth to stop the whimper.

Then she runs into the trees.

When she gets back to her house it is morning, and John is standing by the gate.

'Rebecca?'

He opens his arms and she lets him embrace her, kiss her hair, and when he doesn't ask her where she's been she knows how much he loves her, for all he needs her tamed.

Her husband leads her inside. Her feet make bloody prints upon the ground.


	11. Chapter 11

'Dad?'

'I'm in here, sweetheart.'

Sure enough, there he is, looking through a chest of documents inside his bedroom. Meg leans against the doorframe, blowing hair out of her face.

'Where's the turquoise thing from Egypt? I want to show Thomas.'

'It's a scarab.'

'It's a dung beetle.'

'You've been spending a lot of time with that boy. It's-'

'Unseemly? You're not about the lecture me about etiquette, are you, because that would be bloody ironic, not to mention hypocritical.'

'I was going to say it's unwise. You don't want to get too fond of him.'

'Father, please. Just tell me where to find the bloody beetle.'

'It's in the chest on top of the wardrobe.' Meg nods and begins the far too difficult task of retrieving the chest. After she's tried climbing on a chair (which she breaks), jumping up and throwing her shoes at it, her father relents and easily brings it down for her. There might be more grey in his hair than gold, but he's still strong.

'Meg?'

'Found it! Yes dad?'

'Meg, you won't…do something silly, will you?' She stops her hurried movements. She looks up. Her father's eyes are worried, too blue, and his mouth seems weak.

'Dad.' She whispers.

'I don't like you being alone. On the ship there was always-'

'I'm not alone, dad. I have Thomas.' He nods, and she goes to hug him. He clutches her, buries his face in her hair, thanks a God he does not believe in that she exists.

'That woman – the one you never rally speak about. She came from here, didn't she?'

That breaks through the silence, and he find his throat is dry – cannot quite speak.

'It's fine – you don't' need to answer. Just – you can talk to me, you know.'

He nods. He can't do anything else.

Then she's raced out of the door, and he's alone.

For a moment, John Smith is still. He fights the urge. He bites it back. But then he gives in.

He goes to a box beside the bed, takes a key from around his neck, it clicks in the lock.

Inside there is a scrap of silk, blue as a river. Upon it the faded, broken, ghostly skeleton of a leaf, snatched out of the air when he lay wounded on a ship, watching the shrinking figure of a young woman, and listening to the wind. It is bone pale, and delicate as a dream.


	12. Chapter 12

She meets him with a grin upon her face. The music in the wind is louder – it's calling for him., it wants him, he knows this, it's knitted up in his heart, and he catches Meg's hand, and pulls her away.

He can hear it clearer, now, as though the salt girl eclipses his father's blood.

He tugs her through the trees – he's running. He can hear it. Finally – finally he will find where it leads. It –

'Are we going to the willow?'

'What?' But now she's pulling him, and they race side by side, and the voice, the music, it is louder, it is frantic, it's singing with joy because he's almost there –

They come to a weeping willow tree beside a river. The music settles, stains the air ochre. Meg turns to grin at him.

From between the branches of the willow emerge a filthy dog, an old raccoon. There is no hummingbird – he remembers it when he was a boy. It must have died. They come to greet the girl and boy, and Meg smiles, and hands him a turquois carving.

'It's a dung beetle.' She grins.

They go swimming. It's Meg's idea – she's good at swimming, and she likes to show off. When they're out of the water, and she is picking daisies from the ground, she starts to speak.

'Tom?'

'Yes?'

'A week ago – I saw something. I – I think it might have been a ghost.'

He laughs at that.

'Superstitious nonsense.'

'Oh, shut up. I'm a sailor, we believe everything. But it was night – and I only say it because it was here, because I'd felt odd, as though something was calling to me, and it led me here, and I'd brought my violin – and it felt like a dream- and I played a song my father used to lullabye before I fell asleep – and a woman came out of the trees.

And she had straight black hair, and for a moment I thought it was my mother, even though she called me John, not Elizabeth – that was the name she gave me, Elizabeth.

But she didn't know me.

And her hands were bleeding, and her face was covered with tears, and she looked as through she was broken.

So I thought she must have been a ghost.'

There is a long, stretched silence. Then Thomas speaks.

'I think you were drunk.'

'You bastard!' Meg laughs, herself again, and grabs the scarab beetle up.

'I was going to give this to you as a gift – but I don't think you deserve it now!'

'What – aw, Meg, give it here!' She darts away from his fingers, giggling, leaps down from the willow and sprints into the forest. He runs after her.

A black head and a fair, racing through the trees.

The people who lived then are dead.

Only ghosts are left.

Eventually, Meg runs up a hill – to the edge – and he captures her just as she's about to dive off, tugging her to the ground, about to snatch the scarab and pinning her so she can't wiggle away.

Meg puts it in her mouth.

'That's absolutely disgusting.' He remarks as she chortles. Then she spits it out and watches him pick it up, grinning satisfaction at his grimace.

'I hate you.'

'My only love sprung from my only hate.'

She says it before she thinks. Then blushes, tries to laugh it away, stands, points out to the sea, visible from this waterfall of cliff. She stops.

There is a ship. She knows that ship – the colours on those sails. It's haunted her her whole life through. Dragged to it when she was twelve – the man who said he has her mother's husband – he'd touched her face, tried to have her locked away – but she shot the sailor in the mouth and ran.

Then in China, in the port the ship came and away they went.

Out on the sea, they'd lost them in a storm.

Now here. Now here.

And once before, when she was nine, when they had sailed beside the ship and the man has stroked back her hair and said he'd made her pay, had told her how he'd cut out her mother's eyes and made her beg, before he strangled her and stripped her naked and thrown her on the dung heap, left to the flies.

Who told her what he would do to her, child of her witchwhore mother, and even though her father fought them back, tried to kill the man with greedy eyes, made them flee, the words had lingered in her head, grown louder, made her shake with terror, brought on the faith bound leap into the ocean when she was ten, the frantic screaming, the scarlet brutalization, the nightmares, the fears, the drowning kind of panic, the fear, the fear always there-

She starts to scream. She starts to scream and kneels on the ground and screams louder, clawing at her face, at the young man who stops her, shaking and trembling and screaming and feeling the violet rush take her over, and swallow her up.


	13. Chapter 13

Rebecca is baking bread in the kitchen when he son bursts through the door. He's carrying someone – a girl – and she's whimpering and sobbing and clutching at him.

'Thomas, who is this?'

'Her name's Meg.' He takes the girl through to his bedroom, lays her on his bed. He has to prise her fingers from around his neck.

Rebecca sees her face. It's her –the girl she saw by the willow tree. The young woman curls up on the bed, clutching the cover between her fingers and sobbing.

'I have to go and get her father – look after her, mother.' Thomas kisses his mum quickly on the cheek, then races out the door.

Rebecca's head is pounding.

She tentatively approaches the bed, sit on the end. Her fingers are covered with dough, and her hair is coming out of the bun she's woven it into, and she feels numb.

Slowly, she touches the girl's shoulder.

In a flash, the girl brings herself up, wraps her arms around the woman's neck, clutches her and sobs into her dress. Pocahontas wraps her arms around the girl – around Meg – and feels their hearts beat.

'Shh. Shhh.' She whispers it in her ear


	14. Chapter 14

'Thomas? What-'

'It's Meg!'

It's Meg. It's always Meg. It's only Meg.

So John shuts the door to the rented house and runs with Thomas, out of the town, no time to get a horse, following a path, winding through domesticated fields, until they come to a little thatched house, with a near, orderly garden, like something out of England if it wasn't for the three wild sunflowers which have taken root within the tidy fence.

John runs ahead, to the door, pounds upon it.

The evening is sinking into twilight, as a woman opens the door.


	15. Chapter 15

For a moment their eyes meet. The world is silent. It is less than a split second, but it drags at them. It beats them bruised.

She is older than he remembered. Her hair has streaks of grey in it, and she is far too thin. She's wearing a somber blue dress, seems lost in its voluminous folds, and her hair has been neatly contained within a docile bun, not a strand out of place. She's even wearing an apron.

But her eyes. Her eyes are the same.

And he – he has a bitter look about him, a beaten look, and there is a scar on his cheek, on his neck. His hair is mostly steel grey, and his skin weathered by the sun and sea. There is a stubble of beard on his cheeks and chin.

But when he speaks.

'Pocahontas.'

But when he speaks.

It is as though she is, for a brief moment, more than a dream.

'John Smith.' She touches his hand where it rests on the doorframe.

If she could, she would place them palm to palm.

'Dad?'

Then John runs past her, leaves her staring at the blue stained world, and when she turns and follows him he's got his daughter in his arms. Their heads press together as Meg sobs, and whimpers that the bad man's come to find her, the wolf to eat her up.


	16. Chapter 16

Later, when Meg is sleeping and Thomas sitting by her side, Pocahontas takes John to the kitchen, and pours him tea.

They do not speak. The words are too heavy, and the starts of sentences aborted in their mouths.

The door open.

'Rebecca, what is – Smith.' The blond man stands, nods his head politely, only a slight tension in the jaw giving him away.

'John Rolfe.' Then he looks at Pocahontas, and quirks his lips in a smile she has almost forgotten. 'Rebecca?'

'I have been baptized.' She's almost embarrassed, and John gives a little snort of laughter – cut short by Rolfe.

'She has converted to Christianity.'

'What, Christianity? You go to church, Pocahontas?' He's laughing it, he thinks it's comic.

'Yes, John Smith. I have found God.'

'Or He's found you – hunted you down and stripped you, like we have this land.'

'You claim to be an atheist?'

'Religion doesn't interest me too much.'

'Damnation doesn't frighten you?' Smith looks at Pocahontas, who has spoken with a kind of waver to her voice and an odd terror in her eyes.

'Not compared to life.' He says it gently, but it makes her bite her lip.

'I think you ought to think out your priorities' disapproves Rolfe, but the dark eyes and the blue meet. They do not look away. Everything they are twists itself into a single look.

A river. A willow. The wind that paints the world.

Once upon a time she told him that there was a spirit in everything. That everything was alive. Once upon a time the world itself was filled with God.

But now He lives in a house of stone, and the world has lost its pigment.

'Please, John Smith, look away from my wife.'

'Now now Rolfe, here was I thinking we were in one another's debt.' Insufferably arrogant, he winks at Rebecca, so Rolfe goes to sit beside her, holds her hand. After a heartbeat of hesitation she interlocks their fingers, and he breathes again.

Then Thomas has come inside the room.

'Meg's awake. She wants to speak to Mr Smith.'

'Meg?' Rolfe asks, but the fair haired man has gone, and Mr and Mrs Rolfe are left alone, both watching him retreat, back to his daughter.


	17. Chapter 17

'Daddy?'

'I'm here, love.'

Meg reaches up her arms, wraps them around her father's neck, and she's nothing but a whimper as he picks her up. John clutches her to him, and she hides her face against his neck. She's so small, he thinks of porcelain, of Venetian glass.

'He's coming.' She whispers, voice thick.

'We'll go. The ship is fixed. We can go.'

He nods to the Rolfe family, shielding his daughter from their eyes, and half kicks open the door. The world outside is black, but he can find his way. He's navigated through midnight seas with cloudy skies, and he can find their home.

She's warm in his arms. She's always been warm – when he dragged her from the ocean, when he picked her up (her and her bleeding carcasses of arms), when he held her the first time and looked into her pitch dark irises.

'John?' he turns around. There she is. Standing in the doorway, haloed in the light.

As she has stood hundred times. A thousand. In his dreams she's stood before him, held out her hand – but then there are tall trees, and soft soil, and the wind. Now there is a doorway, and her hair is tied away, and she has lost her freedom, her sense of sense. The girl who hurled around river bends is dead.

'Goodbye, Pocahontas.' John Smith says, and walks away.

And the woman in the doorway breaks away from the house, runs to him, watches him leave her.

The words she sings are soft, broken, a mess of tears.

_You can own the earth and still, all you'll own is earth until..._

The song lingers in the air. The tune his daughter plays on her violin, the song he repeated in his head, through all that blood, through all that murdering and brutality and the faces he still sees before he goes to sleep. But she cannot finish the song. Her face is cut with tears.

_You can paint with all the colours of the wind_. The last time he sung those words was to his sleeping daughter. His daughter in his arms. So he must take her home.

A wind stirs through the pine trees. It wraps itself around them, as he walks away.


	18. Chapter 18

In the morning she tells Thomas to pack a bag, and does the same. John wakes to finds her putting hairbrush, ribbons, pins into a box.

'What are you doing, Rebecca?'

'Sorry. I did not mean to wake you.'

'No, I mean- why are you…' His voice trails into the air, as he meets her guilty gaze.

'I have to do this, John.'

'Do what?'

'Thomas said,' she puts in her underskirt, clean handkerchiefs, an old compass dug with frenzied fingers from the ground 'that they need protection the King does not think them high enough to grant. A captain come pirate and his bastard daughter. But I,' her movements are harsh, violent 'I am their _pet_. I am the tamed savage, who wears dresses and bears the son of a white man. I am the heathen who has embraced their God, and they love me for it, and if they will not listen to him they will listen to _me_.'

'You're talking nonsense, Rebecca-'

'My name is not Rebecca! My name is Pocahontas.'

For a moment they freeze. They stand, one on either side of the bed, both breathing hard.

'My name is Pocahontas. I am a Powhatan. And you can come with me or stay here.'

John nods.

'You are sailing with him, then?'

'It is the fastest way.'

'I will not share his ship.'

'Then come later.' She goes to march out of the door, but he catches her arm.

There is a wilderness in her eyes he has hoped to never see again.

'Reb- Pocahontas. I do love you.'

A silence. A lungful of air.

'I love you too, John. But I have to do this. He saved your life. He saved mine. I'm doing this because he is our friend. And I am doing this for our son.'

She kisses him, and then goes to join her son in the garden. Thomas shakes his father's hand, then off they go, walking down the path, to Jamestown.

John Rolfe stands beside the gate, and watches their dark heads grow smaller in the morning sun.


	19. Chapter 19

Meg sits in the rigging, pulling her violin closer to her chest and trying very, very hard not to cry. Her heart feels far too heavy where it dangles, a passion fruit between her lungs. It is waterlogged, it is too heavy, each throb hurts.

She will never see him again.

Her father shouts orders below, tells the sailors to remove the gangplank (she can hear some kind of rough edge to his voice, it is grated by the air). She doesn't like some of the men they've hired, as the original crew aren't at all ready to leave immediately. One boy, with horrible oily skin and thick breath, keeps looking at her, rolling his eyes up and down her body – it makes her feel dirty, and makes her aware of the rising panic in her chest.

'Wait!' It's Thomas. Down below, holding a bag, running to the ship.

'Leave the plank!' she screams, then swings herself down the rigging, landing on the deck and running down to the dock, catching his hands in hers.

'What are you doing here?'

'We're coming with you.'

'What do you mean, Thomas?' calls down her father from the side of the ship.

'He means, John Smith,' speaks a woman, approaching the boat and clutching a bag in her arms, 'that we are coming with you.'

'We are going to Spain.'

'No. We are going to England.'

'If I am not mistaken, Rebecca, I control this ship.'

'If you want to save your daughter, John, you will do what I say.'

Meg half thinks her father will refuse, and she catches Thomas' hand in hers out fear that she will lose him, lose him just as she though he would stay with her, keep her grounded, watch the seabirds wheeling in the wind.

But her father does not refuse the Indian woman. And, with more confidence than Meg has ever seen the woman display before, she climbs the gangplank and easily swings herself onto the ship.

John Smith looks at her with injured eyes.


	20. Chapter 20

And so they all begin another kind of life.

John gives up his cabin for a protesting Pocahontas, and he and Thomas sleep with the other sailors. Meg stays happily enough in her small cabin, decorated with leaves from the Virginian shore and the scarlet stained map. She likes having Thomas on board the ship. She teaches him how to climb the rigging, deal with the sails in the wind, how to navigate only with the sparkling mantle of the sky. She tells him that the Inuits believe the stars are holes, through which the light of the infinite shines through. Sometimes he sees her laughing in the sun, with her salt wrecked cheeks, and he wants very much to kiss her.

He doesn't like the way that oily sailor looks at her. As though he wants to eat her up. Some of the men look at her with less than honorable eyes, as she climbs to sit in the webbing of ropes above them. They think it's odd that the Captain lets his daughter on board. Dressed like a boy as she is, they think she's asking for it – their hungry gaze, moistened lips, sniggered comments in the dark.

Meg does not notice.

Thomas would very much like to beat them blue.


	21. Chapter 21

'Do you think they knew each other?' Thomas whispers to Meg, as they watch Smith watch Rebecca, who has come up from her demure cabin for a breathe of air.

'They must have. My father came here before – when he was young. Has your mother ever mentioned him?'

Thomas shakes his head, as they watch Rebecca go to the edge of the deck, and Smith's eyes follow her.

'My father said that what he saw here changed the way he saw the world.'

'Changed it how?'

'Well, he always tells me not to judge until I have walked in someone else's footsteps. And he stops the sailors from being cruel to the native people of whatever country we are in. When we were in Africa we stayed in a port which had slaves for sale, and one runaway was caught, and a sailor helped to catch him and hold him down while they beat him. So my father gave the sailor his pay and abandoned him on the shoreline. And I asked him why and he said a woman taught him understanding, and he has not forgotten.'

Smith gives the wheel to another sailor, walks over to a sail which the crew is having trouble with. As though sensing his movement, Rebecca turns to look at him

'He says the most monstrous thing we do, when we find a new world, is try to make it exactly like the old one. And he has very strong opinions about the Indians, and about how they should not be-'

'We, you mean.' Thomas interrupts. Meg has got a far off look in her eyes, and he feels he has to remind her of who she sits beside. 'I am an Indian, after a fashion, for all my father wishes he could forget this fact.'

'Sorry. You. Strong opinions about how your people should not be exterminated.'

'There are some who think we should be?'

'There are many.' Meg says, sadly. 'I wonder…' she murmurs to herself.

'He has written about all of his travels. And he said that when he was in the new world, there was a girl. A woman. Who saved his life. What is your mother's name?'

'Rebecca.'

'No. Her real name.'

Thomas pauses for a bit. Her real name. The one not given too late, the one she had from birth. The one her father whispered over her.

'Pocahontas.'

'It is her, then.' They watch the Indian woman look away from Smith, just as he glances towards her. The sail flaps above them, out of control but not dangerous, yet. 'She saved him.'

'Should we tell them we know?' Thomas asks.

'No. Never.'

'Why?'

'Because.' Sailors move about the deck like so many ants. The Captain's eyes dart to the woman standing there, looking out into oblivion. 'Because I rather think she broke his heart.'

A beat. A silence.

'Come on and make yourself useful, Thomas – you can help me with this sail.' And Meg stands and Thomas stands and they join her father and the two sailors, and all five of them manage to fix the ropes, and get it under control.

The wind is wild, now. It howls.


	22. Chapter 22

Pocahontas has given up her other name. She undertakes this surrender the day the wind whips out all her pinned up hairs. She's spent most of the time holed up in her cabin, doing her best to play the respectable woman. But she gives up, and goes up the deck, and as soon as she steps into the open air she loses all those ribbons and pins, and sees John at the wheel.

It's then that she loses Rebecca, once and forever– if she ever really had her.

She joins the captain, and he turns to smile at her. There is no bitterness in his eyes, now, only a faint shadow of regret.

'You didn't write to me.' She says, quietly. On the deck below, Meg has a book open, and is telling Thomas about sea birds.

'I know.'

'You didn't come back.'

'I know.'

'Why? I mean, really, why?' Because his last answer wasn't enough.

He seems to refuse to look at her, and she's about to run back to her cabin in anger when he finally speaks.

'How could I write?' He speaks with gritted teeth, for all his face is impassive, his eyes fixed upon his daughter. 'When I recovered there were men who wanted to kill me. I was trying to find a way back to you when they first attacked me – and from then on I was running. I slept in ditches, by the side of the road. And – God's sake, none of this matters. You made your choice. I wish you happiness. I am glad that you have found it.'

Her throat feels thick. Her eyes are stinging – they do that sometimes, start to leak, soak her face appallingly.

'I just want you to know,' and now he looks at her, finally, takes his eyes away from their laughing children, 'that if you had asked me to come with you, I would have. I would have come and lived in the forest with your people. I would have dressed myself in – in animal skin, and painted my face, and shaved my head if that was what I had to do to stay with you. My culture – my history – it means nothing to me. I would have given it up for you. As you gave up your name for Rolfe – for your husband. I suppose you must love him very much. But I will tell you this,' he laughs the intensity away, grins at her to show he doesn't hate her, 'I won't call you Rebecca. It doesn't suit you.'

If she clutches her hands together any tighter she will draw blood. She cannot bear to look at him.

'How is your father?' He asks, eyes back to his laughing daughter once again.

She cannot stand it. Not a moment more.

Only half hiding the sob she runs back to her bedroom – but hears him shouting for Meg to take the wheel, hears his footsteps behind her as she runs to her cabin - or rather his cabin, which is filled with maps and compasses and books and drawing Meg did when she was a little girl, and a small box beside the bed which she wants to open but which is firmly locked. Pocahontas runs to the cabin and she shuts the door, locking it tight and kneeling, still sobbing, pressing her forehead to the grain of the wood.

He comes to the door. A sound as though he is kneeling down. A long silence, punctuated by her sobbing, his even breaths.

She never used to cry this much. When she was a young woman, she hardly ever cried.

But now she cannot seem to stop.

'My father is dead.' The words hurt. 'He died of smallpox – of a virus caught from the white men. Most of my tribe died. Then they left and – and – and I didn't see him, heard all this from a merchant in the town who used to trade with them, and he is dead and I hadn't gone to _see him_.'

She keens for a little bit, bites her lips to bits.

John does not ask to come inside. But he waits for her, until he's called away, and she is left alone, with her savage sorrow, her aching guilt, and the knowledge that she gave it all for love.


	23. Chapter 23

The next day is crystal, and she is one of the first up, joining the sailors who have been on night watch. No, no more petticoats and stays. She dresses herself in an old grey skirt and loose bodice, wears a jacket over the top, and John finds her sitting on the prow of the ship, watching the sea birds wheel in the blazing sky.

He sits beside her. She takes his hand.

And things change. Perhaps things change because of Meg, who seems to have developed a deep affection for the elder woman, and lends her some breeches, shows her how to climb the rigging, discusses Indian stories, the food of Pocahontas' childhood. Asks what it was like to live in a world where everything had a spirit. Pocahontas, in her turn, braids the girl's hair, and even kisses her forehead, thinking how she would have liked a daughter like Meg – all bright eyes and pealing laughter (she forgets, as many people do, the screaming, demented Ophelia, who would gladly rip her own skin to shreds).

Perhaps things change because of Thomas. Separate from his father, he neglects his bible reading in favor of patching sails, or climbing to the top of the mast. He seems to wear his own skin with confidence, and his bright smile, his calloused hands, his sun burned skin makes Pocahontas smile at him. The way he blushes when Meg kisses his cheek – that makes his mother smile, too.

And there is John. John who lets her steer the ship, who tells her about all the places where he's been, doesn't ever remind her again that she did not choose him. John asks her opinion about things. About whether animals have souls like humans do. About whether woman should have the same rights as men. About whether people can help becoming evil, or if it is just caught up in their blood. He seems to have developed a philosophical streak, since they last met, and she finds she likes it. Wonders if it was perhaps partly due to her.

John helps her rescue a bird that gets caught in the ropes of the rigging, and they smile as it launches into open sky, it's feathers haloed, sanctified in the sun.

It empties its bowels on John Smith's head. She doesn't think she's ever laughed so much.

He lends her books he brought to read to Meg (never much for paper turning himself) – a book about India, the place they were looking for when they found her country. A book called Arcadia. Utopia, which confuses her but which she likes. And Shakespeare.

She likes Shakespeare – especially the sonnets. But sometimes they are too sad – and she doesn't want sadness any more – she wants to run to the deck, to fling up her arms in the sun, swing herself into the rigging alongside the sailors with as much ease as she had when she was young. She wants to laugh with him, to see his eyes light up when he speaks of Venice, of the Netherlands half under wave, of the bleak brutal beauty of a world called Russia. Of the spices in Arabia. Of the temples of Greece.

When she is with him, it is as though she is able to taste the world.

Or perhaps things only change because of the sky – because it is so infinite. So blue.

Perhaps things change due to the wind.


	24. Chapter 24

There is a moment when she realizes the full shock of what she feels for the man called John Smith.

Oddly enough it's due to her boy, her little Thomas. She's sitting in her cabin, flicking through an illustrated book of English plants, and half wondering if she ought to be reading the bible, when there are shouts from the deck. The book slips from her hands, papers rustling, and she runs to the deck.

A strange scene.

In the middle of the deck, a young sailor lies on the ground, swearing loudly and clutching a bloody nose. He's missing one or two teeth, and his mouth leaves raspberry smudges on the wood beneath him.

And her son – her peaceful, wind wanting, smiling son stands over him, breathing hard, fingers clenched into fists and a little trickle of blood coming from the corner of his mouth.

And Meg, little Meg, she clutches the side of the ship and trembles appallingly, eyes wide and frantic, mouth a little bit agape, as though about to scream.

'What is the meaning of this? I will _not_ have fighting on board my ship.' Shouts the captain, running to the scene, past the frozen Pocahontas.

'This savage attacked me!' the sailor squirms upwards, and John grabs Thomas' arm to restrain him. 'Here I was, minding my own business, when he appears out of nowhere – like the filthy animal he is. You shouldn't have let them-'

'That's enough, Samuel.' John Smith's voice is even. 'What do you say happened, Thomas?'

Her son swallows. Looks to Meg, who has begun to breathe quickly, and Pocahontas sees his gaze, goes to the blond haired child and pulls her to sit on the ground, holds her hands and looks into her eyes.

They hear the continued conversation, and Pocahontas wants to look, wants to see what is happening, but she knows she cannot look away from the dark brown gaze of the young woman.

For the first time, she wonders who her mother was.

'This – he was saying things. Insinuating.'

'You will have to be clearer than that, Thomas.' Don't look away, don't look away, the girl is almost into madness once again, and she needs you, needs you so much her fingernails dig into your skin from fear.

'He was talking about Meg. Saying filthy things about her. And she could hear and told him to stop and walked to him, and he grabbed her hand and she started screaming, so I hit him.'

'More than once, from the looks of things.'

'Yes.'

'And those who were watching – which story is true.' _Why_ doesn't he just believe her son? He would clearly never lie. He is clearly telling the truth.

But perhaps that is not the way a captain has to think.

But the murmurs, the general consensus seems to be that the Indian boy is telling the truth.

Meg shuts her eyes and lets go of Pocahontas' hands in relief. The older woman turns to see the ending of the scene.

John stands between the two young men, looks them both evenly in the eyes, and says that if he catches them fighting again he will have them whipped.

And if the sailor so much as says his daughter's name, he will keel hall him.

The look in his eyes as he says that. He really, truly means it, because he loves his daughter so – loves his daughter surely just as much as she loves her son.

Then, when the watching crowd has dispersed, she sees him take her son aside and thank him.

Perhaps he cares about her son, too.

And it is at this moment, watching her son smile at the way the older man shakes his hand, seeing the way her son holds himself – upright, tall, free – it is at this moment that she realizes she never really…

She never really gave him up. John Smith. No matter how many times she tried, she never really gave him up.


	25. Chapter 25

They will land in England in approximately three days. So they are dancing. Here, beneath a sky so crammed full of stars it seems as though it might sink, Meg pulls out her violin and sailors dance. They sing, too, beat out a rhythm on the deck, dancing to the light of flicker fast lamps in the dark clarity of night.

Thomas watches Meg. She is laughing, throwing back her head of butter yellow hair, playing her violin as though her life depends upon it. She is bright and brave and blazing and oh so very beautiful. So he pulls himself to his feet, from where he's sitting on the deck, and goes to her, and takes her hands- she gives her violin to a reaching sailor, who continues the jaunty tune.

And they dance.

He and Meg – they dance out a drum beat on the wood, hands clasped together, and then they spin, round and round, and he looks at her eyes and he swears, he promises to God, that he will never let her go.


	26. Chapter 26

Their parents watch.

'John won't allow it.' She says to him. 'We – he – wants Thomas to marry a girl from the town. Maybe the Doctor's child. It would be a powerful symbol of how two cultures can combine. She is very beautiful – she has red hair and perfect skin. Thomas would hate to be her husband. And your daughter, for all she is clever and funny and pretty, is also mad.' There is a long pause. She speaks evenly, without emotion. 'My people would blame it on bad spirits.'

'Mine would do the same.' John, of course, is the one to laugh it. 'Only they would lock her in a cell and let people come and gawp, for a reasonable price.'

The two young people spin and dance, throwing their heads back, as though they have never really lived till now.

'He has made her happy.' He says.

'As she has him.'

'But sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, the world cannot accept it. The world is not always…prepared.' She looks at him, but there is no suggestion he meant to refer to anyone other than their two dancing children.

'Who was her mother?'

'Why? Jealous?'

'No!' but she blushes, and that makes him laugh, before he turns somber.

'She was a Russian woman. She found me in Constantinople – I was being sold. A slave. I saw her in the crowd. She was wearing a veil across her face- but not her hair, which was very thick and black as ink and for a I moment I…' he grins an ironic smile 'I thought she was you.' She takes a moment to register this before he continues.

'She took me back to Russia. She was married, but her husband stayed in Constantinople, settling debts. Russia was…in some ways it reminded me of the New World. All towering trees and thick shadows. But they had serfs there – slaves, I suppose, and she put me in charge of them. I hated myself for it. Those men and women – forced to give up everything for their master. As she was, after a fashion.' He muses into silence, and she is forced to prompt him, forced to ask him _why and how he loved her_ and she can't say why she wants to know, only that she must.

'She showed me her land. She loved it – she really did, finally seemed to grow a voice when surrounded by dark green. She was so little – very delicate and very lost, with large brown eyes that seemed almost always on the verge of tears. But she was kind, and I loved her because I needed her, or someone like her, and she felt the same for me. Who knows, maybe it's not love when it could be anyone before you.

She was very beautiful. Very, very beautiful, and the perfect lady in every way. Other than her hair she couldn't have been less like…'

A beat.

'Me.' Pocahontas whispers. 'Or at least, me as I was.'

They stand in silence for a bit, watch the dancing end and most of the sailors trickle below decks, leaving only a few on watch.

Then they go and sit on the prow, where they won't be seen, and look up at the star sunk sky and feel the wind peel away their skin and tears and all those years, and for a moment both remember corn fields and dark trees and hummingbirds like flicks of light.

The lonely threnody of a violin strikes up from the web of rigging into which Meg has woven herself. The song, sung by her father (as most of the songs she plays were, once upon a time) makes a harmony of the air.

Remember. The wind whispers it. The streaming down of moonlight. I'd rather die tomorrow than live a hundred years without. Better if none of this. Never met. If I never knew you. Precious life. Darkness into light.

Empty as the sky.

She does not cry. She is stronger than that, now. But she turns to look at him, as his daughter plays a lament of a love song, and, in the distance, the sun rises.

It dawns a tentative scarlet, washes everything in red, and empties out the sky of light.


	27. Chapter 27

And they disembark, and they go to live in John Smith's small London house, and they seek an audience with the King and they wait.

Meg and Pocahontas give up their breeches, dress themselves once again as women, and the elder even captures her hair in a silken net, as other mothers do in England. Meg scowls and braids her hair defiantly into two childish plaits, and climbs out the window to sit on the roof, ranting against the limitations of dry land to the pigeons.

Pocahontas takes Thomas to see Mrs Jenkins and Uttamatomakkin. The old woman, even more frail than when Pocahontas had last seen her, coos over Thomas and gives him slices of cake to eat, and tea in delicate cups which he holds awkwardly. She pats Pocahontas' hand, calls her 'Dear Rebecca' and asks for news of her darling boy. Flinching with guilt, Pocahontas tells her that John is a successful tobacco merchant, that she is well respected in Jamestown, that she regularly goes to church, that they have a beautiful house, that Thomas has a tutor who thinks very highly of him, that there have been very few conflicts with the natives (she leaves out that this is because most of them are dead). When Mrs Jenkins starts to talk to Thomas, ask him about books, about his friends, Pocahontas goes to stand with Uttamatomakkin. She looks at him, dressed in foreign finery. Like a statue. Like a painting. Like a stuffed hunting trophy – come, behold the Noble Savage, tamed and dressed and still.

When they return to John Smith's house, Pocahontas breaks a pot, and smashes the pieces until there is nothing left but dust.

It will not be long before John Rolfe comes.

She turns down Mrs Jenkin's offer for them to stay there, prefers the musty smell of John's so long uninhabited house, with it's faded maps and mildewed books. He gives her and Meg funds to buy dresses appropriate for an audience with the king, and they are forced to endure the search for stays, farthingales, ruffs, even. The dressmaker sighs and tutts over Meg's unfashionably boyish figure, her calloused fingers and sun pealed skin, for all she is suitably short and delicate. In her turn Meg glares daggers at the woman, and sniffs loudly whenever the dressmaker comes too close. She wears a wig, and Meg can see fleas hopping in it, for all her lardy perfumes.

Pocahontas smiles to herself. She is not so much of a trial, for all they think she's far too tall, and readily accepts the draping of silks and satins, safe in the knowledge that it will be over soon.

But when they are laced and squeezed and cracked into their caged dresses, there is a kind of claustrophobic panic to them, and Meg holds her breath, to stop the frightened shrieks.

John walks with Pocahontas around London, takes her to the theatre, the Thames, markets bustling over with odd smells. She carries a posy of flowers with her, the stink is so awful, and John tells her not to touch anyone, because they may be sick. But he shows her the frantic, churning, fascinating underbelly of a world she's been to before but never really seen, and she thanks him for it.

They eat English foods, stodgy or gruel thin, which is bland but oddly interesting.

She is, however, particularly fond of the sweetmeats he buys her – sugared rose petals, like little whispers of saccharinity, candied orange peel, little marzipan pears and apples, painted to perfection.

He laughs with her. He makes jokes to see her smile. He listens to her – really, truly listens to her, and she has the feeling he's remembering everything she says.

He is her friend. First and foremost, broken hearts and history aside, he is her friend.

She cannot remember the last time she had a friend.

So when he finds her pounding that clay pot to bits, he catches her hands and holds her while she cries, and he asks her – not what's wrong, because he doesn't have the right to ask that and because it won't help her, and helping her is what he wants, first and foremost, before everything, anything except Meg – what he can do to help.

She tells him about the closing forces of stone walls, about the silken skirts that trap your legs, about gardens that must be grown just so, about beating back animals from a newly cleaned floor, about hair being tied away, about stockings and shoes and whispers.

About hearing that everyone you used to love is dead or disappeared.

About hating yourself.

Losing what you are.

Quietly, he tells her about the awful intoxication of watching men die by your own hand. About the crimson arc of blood. Cardinal red. About the heat and the dirt and the flies and the devil in your mirror. About losing who you are.

Then he takes her to the window, and pours grain into her hands, and doves and pigeons come, and the wind lifts up strands of her hair, and their clustered bodies are soft and warm and he is beside her and-

His eyes are very blue.


	28. Chapter 28

Everything changes when her husband arrives. They receive word from Mrs Jenkins, with whom he thought to find his wife and child, so they leave the small house and retreat back to the mansion. She hugs her husband, and sleeps in his bed, and tries to forget that since she saw him last, however chaste her actions have been, she has been slumbering in another man's bed. First on the ship, with sheets that were clean but worn, then on land, when he and Thomas slept in the drawing room, and she in John Smith's bed – with plain woolen sheets in pale blue.

Very different from her husband's bed, which has burgundy brocade and thread of gold embroidery, as befits an aristocrat.

She is afraid she smells of Smith – of salt and air and sweat. But the rose water she sprays on herself must cover it up, if it is there at all, and her husband does not comment on any change.

All the same. He is happy to see her. But perhaps he is slightly thrown by the way she tosses back her head and meets his eyes, in a way which she has not for many years.

In the other house, she would remove her hair net as soon as she stepped inside, kick off her shoes, peel away the awful stockings. But now she is a lady at all times, and her husband will insist on ensuring she remembers all that she was taught, last time, when she first fell in love with him.

She does not see her friend. They both seem to realize the impossibility of such a visit, and she feels the aching gap in her heart more brutal, now, than ever.

But she has Thomas.

And her husband is kind, and gentle, and mature (and maybe, just a little bit, like Kocoum, that man she has not thought about in years, would have been, had she married him). A handsome sturdy husband building handsome sturdy walls indeed.

He brings her bouquets of English flowers instead of seeds to feed a mess of rag tag birds, and rings and tasteful filigrees of lacy fans instead of sweetmeats. He tells her how beautiful she looks, as she sits by the mirror in the morning and fixes her hair in a mass of tumbling curls (he always has loved curls), and she smiles at the compliment and tries to put away a memory of another man, smiling as she wears his daughter's breeches, as she shakes free her hair of pins and, on the ship, in a moment of freedom, throws her shoes overboard (which had to be retrieved by a hysterically laughing Meg, as it will be impossible to walk around London barefoot).


	29. Chapter 29

The next time she sees John Smith is when she has her audience with the King.

Mrs Jenkins helps her dress. She is laced, stockinged and powdered into a semblance of English beauty. They even ghost her cheeks with rouge. Then her hair is fixed with a hairpiece of pearls and emeralds, which is far too heavy, and she is dressed in her dishonest finery – in gold and white brocade, with an underskirt of pale yellow.

She remembers why she came here.

And so she and John and Thomas bow and curtsy to the King and Queen, and explain the situation – the illegitimate child, the Russian noble, the constant flight (they leave out the madness, lest it is judged a deserved punishment from God).

Behind them stand John and his daughter. Meg is wearing sky blue silk, which suits her, but the skirt and sleeves swamp her, as does the overflowing quantity of her golden hair.

Her sunburn has been powdered over, and her lips painted red. But she looks little more than a small, frightened child, clutching at her father's hand.

As before, after the appeal, Pocahontas is exposed. She smiles, and dances and answers all questions as she should – tells them how she converted in a dress of dove white, how she lives in a house like the other English wives, that she is found of embroidery and oh so very loyal to the nation which has saved her from damnation.

Meg drags her father to a corner of the room, where she stands behind him, and he whispers to her to stop her screaming.

Finally, finally it is over. They half burst into the palace grounds. It is late afternoon – perhaps they would like to take a turn around the gardens, before they leave? His Majesty would be most pleased if they would accept his hospitality.

Her husband wants to go home. But home is filled with lifeless walls and thick shined floors, and so Pocahontas lets Meg grab her hand and they run. Run out of sight of the palace, to the open grounds where there is no one there to spy. They leave behind father, husband, and sprint into the green.

It is growing dark. It starts to rain.

Laughing with more than a little hysteria, they lift up their heads to the opening sky, two women who are almost dead from walls. They spin and turn cartwheels, and dance, dresses caught up in the soaking gale, blowing dilapidated vibrance in the cold grey air.

And when they finish their skirts are all in tatters, their hair hanging in loose, soaking tendrils, and Meg catches her hand and both of them walk, oddly sedate, back to where their families wait. Thomas is standing outside in the rain, lifting his head up to the sky. John Rolfe, ever the English gentleman, has retreated into a waiting carriage. But John Smith stands beside Thomas, and they are deep in conversation, and as they turn to see mother and daughter they both laugh.

And Meg runs to Thomas, who catches her in his arms, and she kisses him, right there, in the middle of the rain, dressed in silk of famished sky.

Pocahontas and John Smith look at their children. At one another.

Then she climbs into the coach, to sit beside her husband, who is looking with disapproval at the young couple laughing in the rain.


	30. Chapter 30

'What I don't understand,' he frowns on the coach ride back 'is why the King's protection is so important.'

Pocahontas doesn't want to answer. Her head has started hurting.

'I mean,' he is annoyed, frustrated, she can hear in in the way he articulates the words, 'it will only be a piece of paper. A diplomatic gesture. But it won't stop this man, if the stories Smith and his daughter tell are true. It won't do any real good.'

_But they will have something. Some legal protection. _She thinks._ It would make taking that girl tantamount to kidnapping a royal, or an aristocrat. A deed in direct contradiction to the wishes of the English monarch, and off putting for not only the Marquis, but for his country – large and wild as it is. So if Meg is taken, if he succeeds in stealing her, he will be fighting this land and that. And he is not so powerful that he can afford to fall out of grace was the Tsar. _

Or at least, this is what John Smith had told her.

And her husband must know it too – after all, he was a diplomat himself, once upon a time. So he's asking because he is jealous.

The thought makes her swallow back guilt, and so she catches his hand, holds it tenderly.

Thomas sits opposite them, gazing out of the window. He does not acknowledge his parents, more concerned with the drumming of dark grey rain outside.

They eventually arrive back at the house, and she disappears up to her bedroom, combs out and braids her hair – she doesn't want dinner, thank you, she's very tired. Then Pocahontas climbs into the large silk sheeted bed. Curtains hang around it – she draws them, letting the heavy velvet fall round her, creating a warm, dark nest of sorts. The color is wine red.

She has done her duty. For her friend and the girl her son loves. She has done all she ought to. All she should.


	31. Chapter 31

So they book the ship back to the New World.

Thomas does not want to leave. Does not want to leave Meg. He has stony arguments with his father, goes through periods of silence. Announces his intention to become a sailor, to go with Meg and John, see a hundred places. Marry her.

Pocahontas wants to scream, sometimes. She can't bear it. She will have to go back, to those solid walls and stifled gardens, to the place where the wind blows in vain against glass. She will stop breathing again.

And if her son has his way, she might never see him again.

One night she cannot stand it any longer. It's after another argument, and Thomas as stormed out, gone to find the girl he loves with or without his father's blessing, and she is lying in the darkness of her bed.

And.

The wind whispers urgency against the glass.

She climbs out of the window, dangles herself from the tree outside, and falls, crouching, silent, to the ground.

She has to tell him.


	32. Chapter 32

So she ghost trips her way along black streets, moving silent as a shadow, pulling herself with ease onto rooftops when dark figures walk past her, or intoxicated male voices come too close for comfort. But when she comes to the house and knocks on the door no one answers. She waits and waits, shaking with filthy feet in her thin cotton nightdress. But no one comes.

So she clambours up the side of the house, digging her fingers into cracks in the stones, pulling herself onto the window ledge. She tries to see into the dark interior. Knocks on the glass.

No one comes. No one answers. But – there – a dark figure lying on the floor, arms resting in a disjointed angle. It is John.

Pocahontas takes a deep breath, to try and stop the shaking terror of her heart. Then she stands up on the ledge. And she kicks a hole in the glass.

Biting her lip to stop the scream of pain. The glass slickers through her skin. A clean wound but – God – it hurts, and there is so much blood.

She's trembling, she might fall, so she reaches through the hole and unlatches the window, almost collapsing inside.

The moon scutters from behind a cloud, and she goes to the unconscious man.

'John. John Smith.' She tries to shake him awake. He does not respond. 'Wake up!' she screams it out of fear – because where is her son, where is her son? And Meg – where is Meg? Then she rolls him over and slaps him twice around the cheek. Slowly, his eyelids flicker open.

'Pocahontas – what?'

'Where are our children? Where are our children, John?'

The house is empty. Pots are smashed. Maps torn from the walls.

She leaves him lying on the ground and tries to find a trace of where they might have gone, who might have taken them. The house has been destroyed, that much is clear – destroyed out of pure malice, no necessityt. She goes into Meg's room – no sign of a struggle, here, but a piece of fabric caught on the door, as though Meg ran out of it. But where would she go?

Her father's room.

It is here that most of the damage lies. Books are scattered across the floor, pages ripped to shreds. A chair has been smashed, and the pillows are opened, feathers coating the room. A few still linger in the air – who ever did this can't have been gone long.

The moonlight slants in. It makes an eerie dream of the bedroom, haloes and silhouettes the feathers caught in the twists and eddies of the silver air. She treads with a slight limp, leaves a little trail of blood upon the ground. In a kind of horror she approaches the bed.

So Meg runs in, sees that her father is not here. She tries to bolt the door – it has been forced upon. She runs to the window – it gapes upon slightly, letting in the feather floating breeze. But something stops her. Who ever is chasing her – they have a gun. She backs away towards the bed.

The pillows have been slashed. And there is blood on the disordered sheets.

Feeling sick, Pocahontas kneels before it. There is so much blood- treacle, thick and black in the moonlight, coating the blue linen, down smearing itself into the streams. She touches it. It is still warm.

So they have to act fast.

Remembering practicality, she tears a strip from the sheets, uses it to bandage her foot, sitting on the bed to do so. Her other foot brushes against something. The box always beside his bed. It has been kicked to the floor, and gapes open.

Inside. She picks it up. Inside is a skeleton of a leaf. An old leaf, older than Meg, than Thomas. But she knows the shape. A leaf from the trees of her land. The leaves that blew in the wind, that day he sailed away from her, man with blue eyes and a wound in his side, taking something from her as essential as breath. Some thing intrinsic to who she was. And he had snatched a leaf from the air.

He kept it with him. All this time.

And she thinks, momentarily, of a compass she dug from the bracken and soil, when she found out he was alive. An old compass, broken, cracked, soil smeared and rusted. She keeps it in one of her draws, beneath handkerchiefs and underskirts, where John will never think to look.

But enough.

So she stands and slips her way back to John, who is sitting, clutching his head. She pours him a drink of small beer, and watches him swallow it.

'Where is my son, John Smith?'

'He left before they came.'

'And where is your daughter?'

He looks at her as though his heart has broken. And his eyes are empty as the sky itself.

'I don't know.'


	33. Chapter 33

She takes him back to her husband's house – helps him stagger through the streets, because they have wounded him, too, stabbed him deeply in that old wound he received on behalf of her father, so long ago.

Mrs Jenkins opens the door in disapproval.

'John is looking for – who is this?' But Pocahontas has stone in her eyes. She risked everything to stop a war, once long ago. But this time she will fight herself. And she will not stop until she sees them bleed.

She seats John by the dining table.

'Fetch me needle and thread.' John gasps, clutching at her fingers, and off she goes. Her husband stops her, coming down the stairs.

'Where have you been? I was worried about – you're filthy!' But she pays him no attention, grasps her sewing box. John sits, clutching the wound in his side. It is dark in the house, save the light of the fire, so she aluminates a lamp for him to see by.

'Do you need help?' He shakes his head and, with steady fingers, threads a needle and lifts up his shirt.

'Mother? Mother what – Captain Smith!' Thomas. Thank God – Thomas is safe, Thomas is well, and she catches him in her arms, holds him, sends up a prayer to whatever rules this world, be is spirits or a crucified God.

'Where is Meg?' her son asks, with fearful eyes.

She can't quite bear to answer him.


	34. Chapter 34

When she and John are stitched and bandaged, they all sit around the table, candles lit so they can look one another in the eye.

'We have to go after her.' This is Thomas.

'What good will that do?' her husband 'She's gone. And I won't have my wife and son risking their lives for a single girl.'

'You let me risk my life to save my people.'

'This is different. That was a nation. This is a child.'

'I love her!'

'You're eighteen, Thomas, you can't be in love.'

'It is possible, husband, to fall in love when you are young.'

'Like you did, you mean?' he spits this at her, then glances over to John, who is sitting in silence, hands on the table.

'No, I don't meant that at all!'

Then John speaks, looks at Rolfe.

'Sir. I ask you. Please. I need to find my daughter, but I cannot do it alone. I need the support of the king. You and your wife – you can get that for me. Please.'

Rolfe looks at the broken man.

'No. You have no idea where she is.'

'I know where she is.'

'All the same. She is one girl. No.'

John Smith shows nothing. No anger, no sadness. He simply stands and, clutching his side, nods. Then turns to leave the room.

'Where are you going?' Thomas calls, and Pocahontas goes to run after him. Her husband's hand stops her. He looks into her eyes.

And for a moment she sees him. Sees the Englishman who gave up his country, his duty, his ambition, all for her. Who made his life as a farmer, of all things, just to see her happy. She sees him bringing her flour, teaching her to make bread, defending her from the white men who called her names. Sees him fight them, have them arrested, all for her. Sees him laughing with her, kissing her cheek, teaching her to read the bible and stroking her hair as she does so. Sees him look upon their son with pure, heart tearing love. Sees him hold her, in the bed where she has just given birth, and look at her son and say that he is heaven. He is everything.

Sees him teach her son to read, to write. Arrange for tutors. Sees him hold her hand in pride, as they watch him walk to the town for Latin lessons.

Sees him on their wedding day. Looking at her with devotion. With love.

And she rips herself away.

And she follows the broken, bleeding man out of the house.

Her son joins them.

She does not take either of their hands. She is strong enough to support herself.


	35. Chapter 35

While they have been talking, arguing, even, John Smith has been thinking. And he knows where they will have taken his child. Not to a house, not out of the city, but to the docks, to a boat.

They arrive just in time to see the ship sailing away.

Meg clutches and carves her nails in her hands. The cabin she is in is rich, finely decorated. The man's cabin. The Marquis.

Obolensky.

She is lying on his bed, tangled into blankets, clutching at the wound in her side, inexpertly bandaged. The blood is thick, warm, moves sluggishly with each pound of her heart. She bites down on a twisted rag of sheet to stop herself from screaming. The cuts on her arms, where they sliced her open to stop her hitting them away, they have begun to throb again, and the loss of blood is making her light headed. It makes the world spin – the colors are too bright, she can't breathe properly. Blood leeches out of her.

She wants her Dad.

The door opens, and she wants to pick up a chair, a candle stick, anything, to defend herself, prove she is not weak. But despite herself she whimpers, turns away, tries to melt into the wall as he enters.

He pulls up a chair. Sits down.

The door shuts and locks behind him.

No. No. She is the daughter of John Smith, and she is braver than this.

So she pulls herself upright, removed the fabric from her mouth, for all she trembles – and she spits in his face. Weak, she misses, but the man's eyes glimmer with something.

'You're not so much like your mother as I thought.'

She won't react to that. She has an agenda of her own, despite her spinning head, despite the rising fear.

'What do you want with me?'

'More of your father in you.'

'Why have you brought me here?'

'Bastard that he is.'

'Go to Hell!' and she throws herself at him, clawing for his face, and even draws a bit of blood before her throws her off and draws a gun.

He has very pale skin, an aristocrat's face, and pale brown hair. Slimy silver eyes.

She wants to flinch away. Wants to whimper and scream and hit her head again and again, to block out the screaming, the buzzing of flies over her mother's corpse, the whispers in her head.

But she has been running for long enough.

'Tell me what you want with me.'

He smiles, slowly, for all the trickle of blood. He wipes it away – it smears strawberry across his embryonic, sun starved flesh.

'Now why should I do that?'

And she stands. Stands without support, walks up to him, until the mouth of the gun touches her chest – just over her heart.

'Maybe just to see me squirm.' she whispers.

She hates the way he looks at her. There is something in his eyes she Is not used to seeing – but which she knows is very, very dangerous. But she bites back the hysteria, and doesn't shake – doesn't tremble even a bit as he looks at her.

'Your father slept with my wife. I discovered this, killed her, would have killed you, too. Came into your nursery. But the window was open. He had heard my whore of a wife screaming for him to run, before I slit her throat, and he had snatched you up, before I could throw you after her, down into hell. I could have let him go. But an insult like that – for nothing but a sailor to encroach upon what I owned and then take from me my rightful revenge – how could I suffer that? I would have killed you then, when I met you first, if he hadn't...' he trails off and Meg smirks.

'Beaten you.'

The man hits her around the face and puts the gun to her head, still smiling his crocodile grin, while she splutters out a mouthful of blood.

'And then I thought to myself, I could kill him. Or I could kill his daughter. Or I could take her from him. Let him suffer in the knowledge that she was mine to do with as I pleased, as was her slut of a mother.'

Meg bites her lips to stop the scream. She will not look away from him. She will not let him see her scared.

'You know, she loved him. And he did not love her. She said so, when I ripped out her eyes. That she loved him with all her heart, for all he could never return her affection to the same extent. That he made her a better woman. She was mad, a lunatic – I never should have married her. But she has such lovely eyes – like yours as a matter of fact. Very much like yours.' He moves closer and Meg flinches away. She can smell his breathe – the trace of wine, and meat. A carnivorous breath.

There is no wind in the room. No air. She looks at him and tries to run – but he grabs her arms, holds her, bruises her, opens up the slices his men made of her.

And now she cannot hold it back. And the madness comes.

Hysterical, his hands are in her hair, and she is small and screaming and sees flies move out of her mother's eyes, maggots squirm within her skin.

A knock at the door.

The Marquis leaves her, opens it, exchanges a few words with the sailor. Then he leaves.

Clutching at the ripped fabric of her nightgown, which he has not quite succeeded in tearing away, Meg whimpers, claws at the walls, feels them move in about her. Feels her blood drain, smears it across her arms and legs and face, pulls out her hair in great hunks, knows what will happen to her.

Despite herself. She knows.

She clutches closed the gaping nightdress, and sobs.


	36. Chapter 36

They did not expect it to be this easy. After taking all the weapons John had – two swords, one gun, a knife, they had stolen a small boat, rowed out towards where the larger vessel moved – caught up with it, against all odds, for the wind is weak tonight. Thrown up a rope and grabbling hook.

They should have been caught. But they haven't been.

'Stay behind, Thomas.' Pocahontas tells him. He shakes his head, clenching his jaw – he will go after her, he will find her if it kills him.

'Thomas, I need you to keep watch, be ready to row the boat away. Give us a signal, a whistle, if you see any indication that they might be about to discover us.'

'But-'

'I am your captain, Thomas, and you will follow my orders.' Then he turns to Pocahontas.

And he's about to say what he said when they took this boat in the first place. That she should stay. That he does not want to see her hurt.

That he could not bear to –

But she shakes her head. And she reaches for the rope.

One after the other they climb, silently pulling themselves to the deck.

Clinging to the shadows, they find the door which leads below.

The ropes and sails creak. There is a deathly silence. The faint shadows of sailors are looking outwards – they watch in anticipation of rocks, of ships, not two night clouded figures.

From below. A whimpering.

Down the steps, silent, silent, follow the keening moan.

They find the door. John picks the lock, as Pocahontas tenses, listening for footsteps, breaths. The door opens.

Meg sits, a mess of blood and hair and rags of nightdress, muttering under her breath, some childish mantra, a tangle of words indecipherable from one another, and Pocahontas catches a hail Mary and a Mother and an eyeless corpse in the mess of words.

The two adults approach her cautiously. She does not look up. There are awful raspberry smears of blood across her skin, and the nightdress is torn at the chest. Her anxious fingers pick and pull it closed. Her feet squirm.

She is the picture of mindless distraction. Hysterical in the best sense of the word, with her corn gold hair tumbling loose and her eyes wide and very dark.

'Meg.' Her father whispers. But she seems not to hear him.

'Elizabeth.' Pocahontas whispers. John looks at her in surprise, but she knows what she is doing. He told her that was the name her mother gave to the little baby, when she was first born. After the brave queen of England, who was strong and intelligent and bowed to nobody. It didn't fit for a sailor's daughter, so her father called her Meg.

But her mother called her Elizabeth.

Slowly, Meg turns to look at both of them. And perhaps despite the buzzing words, she remembers a story her father told her once. Of how the woman who saved him had a vast quantity of jet black hair, straight and thick and lovely as obsidian. Perhaps she remembers that her mother's eyes were dark as her own.

She looks at them, and stops her twitching. Two very large tears trickle, one after the other, from her left eye.

Then her father, and the closet thing she will ever have to a mother, step forwards and help her stand.

In the distance, they hear a shot.

'Well. That was touching.'


	37. Chapter 37

'How pleasant to see you here, John Smith.' The Marquis enters. He holds a gun in one hand.

Of course it was a trap.

'You and your savage pets. Or is this one your prostitute? The one you loved all the time you were – how do I put this delicately? – screwing my wife. No, no, lets not fight. My men are up there, waiting for me to give the order – they have your boy, the Indian – oh, don't worry, he's not dead. They merely shot him in the arm and dragged him onto the deck. You touch me, and he's dead. Now please, sit down.

Thought to go to the king, did you? Not a good idea. No. Not a good idea at all.

It's not hard to track you, John Smith. People talk. That Rolfe seemed more than happy to explain why he was suddenly departing for England- following his wife. Didn't realize who wanted to know of course. Deception doesn't seem to come easy to him – unusual for a diplomat. But then, perhaps you have set the standards too high, Smith. Your entire life is deception, after all.'

'Bring me my son.' Pocahontas puts as much power as she can into the words – and they are undercut with a suggestion of danger, of brutality she did not think she possessed. But he has taken her son.

The aristocrat smiles slowly, then shouts a few words in Russian.

In a breathless silence, they wait, Meg tucking herself away under her father's arm and burying herself into the fabric of his shirt.

Then a sailor comes, and pushes the boy inside.

With a cry, Meg throws herself to him, catches him before he falls.

'I'm sorry, Meg. I'm so, so sorry.'

'No. It's nothing.' They look at each other, covered in blood – and the word disappears for a moment. There are just two young people, soaked and broken and bruised by the world, holding each other's hands to stop themselves from falling.

'How sweet.' The Marquis steps towards them, and in an instant Pocahontas and John Smith lurch forwards, flanking their children, whilst Thomas pushes Meg behind him, lifting his head and looking the older man in the eye.

'What will you do to us?' Pocahontas almost spits the words. He smiles.

'The thing can speak clearly, can't she?'

John clenches his hands into fists. He cannot afford to act rashly.

Slowly, the Marquis walks towards the woman.

_Meg, in her world, can hear a sound drawing closer. The Marquis has not noticed it yet. It sounds as though it may be – yes. Yes, that is what it is. It will grow louder. _

_She cannot let him hear it. _

_So she starts her sobbing, her whimpering, her moaning madness once again , clutching onto Thomas, and the Marquis turns to look at her in anger._

'Your daughter is insane. I had intended to take her from you. But maybe she is a burden in and of herself.' Meg falls to the floor, pounding at the wood, bruising herself, fighting off Thomas and her father when they try to stop her

_A couple of distant shouts, which go unnoticed by those trapped in a room with the screaming travesty of a young girl, a gunshot which occurs just as she tries to claw her way towards the marquis, and has to be subdued –and then she is silent, allows Thomas to bear her to the ground and hold her, tightly, because he thinks she is going to get them all killed. _

_But he doesn't know. _


	38. Chapter 38

'Yes. I think I may well give her back to you. When I am finished with her.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well. She is a very pretty thing.'

'Don't you dare!' Shouts Smith, desperate, at the point of madness himself, as his daughter rocks in Thomas' arms.

And Pocahontas. Pocahontas, opposite the man holding a gun to her head – she spits in his face.

The man pulls forth a handkerchief, wipes his face clean.

The way he looks at her changes. He looks at with anger. Disgust.

Something else.

'I do have some standards, John Smith. For example, I obey Leviticus in all things. As such, I would not…lie…with a beast such as the one before me, as you did. My crew, on the other hand, are not so well versed in the scriptures as I.'

There is a silence. John reaches for the gun at his own belt, without thinking, but the Marquis is holding a gun to the head of the woman he loves.

And either way…

Hopelessly, he watches the man who has hunted his daughter and him for their whole lives, the monster of a man, nightmare incarnate, push back the hair of the woman he – cares for – and knot his hand into the thick tresses so tightly it must hurts.

And, with a marbled face, pointing the gun at her head, pull her from the room, and lock the door behind him.


	39. Chapter 39

She will not weep. She refuses, as he drags her from the room. Now they have a few minutes to escape. Maybe. Maybe.

She keeps that tableau of them in her head. Meg clutching onto Thomas. Her little boy, grown up and strong. John Smith, watching her go, aching eyes, the man she's always…

And she screams, so loudly it hurts her throat, 'I'd rather die tonight than live without knowing you!'

The marquis hits her around the head for that. She tastes the blood, as it trickles into her mouth

And she. She is going to – oh God. He is dragging her up to the deck. He meant it. When he said he'd give her to the crew. He meant it.

Oh God. Oh God. She shuts her eyes.

They emerge into the open air.

'Please, sir. Unhand my wife.'

It's John. Here, now, in front of her, it's John.


	40. Chapter 41

He must have acted so quickly. A few hours only, to ride to the palace, demand an audience with the king. A ship. A crew. Enough to silently threaten and take this vessel, unheard under the cover of Meg's screaming – Meg, who would have known what another boat approaching sounds like, because she grew up on water. The sailors surrendered quickly – this ship is not built for warfare.

And now her husband and the king's men stand in front of them, holding up weapons.

But the Marquis has a weapon, too.

'Move any closer, and I'll shoot.'

John is looking at her with desperate eyes. He wants to save her. He wants to save her so.

But what can he do, when she's in the arms of death?

Pocahontas raises her eyes to the sky. Up above, in the pre dawn glory, a gull flies.

* * *

There is only one window in the cabin. It is small. But so is Meg.

So while her father and Thomas, wounded as they are, try to force open the door, she shimmies open the window, climbs up the side of the ship, her father's knife between her teeth. She pulls herself, barnacle wise, up to the deck. Sees the Marquis holding Pocahontas, sees the gun.

She creeps. Silent ghost, she creeps.

So many years. So many years with fear, and running in the night, and frantic eyes, and nightmares that lasted even when you were awake.

He took one mother from her.

He will not take her again.

* * *

The gull soars out of sight.

And there is a sound like sliced leather. A warm trickle. A guttural expulsion of air.

The Marquis behind Pocahontas falls, his blood soaking into her hair.

Elizabeth Meg Smith stands there, panting hard, clutching a knife with bloody fingers, covered with dust and arterial froth. The door below decks bursts open, and John and Thomas emerge – just in time to see John Rolfe take his wife with into his arms. Thomas runs to them, embraces his father, his mother.

John Smith puts an arm around his blood soaked daughter, who gives him a disjointed grin. He kisses her forehead, and tastes the bittersweet pang of blood.

He lets her go.

Then she runs to Thomas, stands between her family and his, caught in the urge to embrace and the knowledge that his father does not want her there.

Rolfe does not seem to want to release his son from the embrace he's caught the family in.

But Pocahontas kisses her husband's cheeks, and the boy breaks away, and he picks up and spins his blood stained, bedraggled parody of Ophelia. And John Smith. Crosses the deck. Kneels before Rolfe.

And thanks him, from the bottom of his heart.


	41. Chapter 42

There is a marriage in a small church, and the bride has blond hair, and smiles as though her head has, finally, healed

Her father has a moment of panic before the ceremony, when he looks out at the congregation and realizes that the Indian woman walking to take her place at the front of the church is wearing a cross about her neck.

No blue necklace, now.

But he turns to take his daughter up the aisle, the fear stops. Turns to a sharp bite of happiness.

She is wearing the same dress she wore to go to court – a fine, pale blue. But it has been strung all over with daisies, apple blossom, tea roses, and she seems less uncomfortable, wearing a mantle of spring over a dress the colour of the sky. A wreath of tiny roses and pearly ribbons decorates her hair, which has been combed out in a sheath of wheat about her shoulders, fountaining down her back.

And she wears a necklace.

An odd, foreign necklace, which sparks whispers as he father leads up her the aisle. A necklace in a bright turquoise blue, a mother of pearl shell sheened all over with rainbows dangling from the center. A necklace of wind and rain and freedom.

He does not look at the woman who gave it to his daughter, as he hands her to Thomas, who smiles with more joy than should be possible. His wounds have healed. He is holding the hand of the girl he loves.

They intend to travel. To see the world on her father's ship, for he claims he is getting too old, and gives it happily to them. He stands alone at their wedding, smiling, occasionally clutching his side.

Pocahontas and her husband stand together, hands entwined. She does not look at the father of the bride.

They part on cordial terms. Pocahontas tells her husband her intentions – to go back to their home as his wife, because she does love him, truly. They have a solid, peaceful life together. And she has changed enough for that to be what she really wants. But they will go and look for the other Powhatan tribes, and try and find her friends. Her family. Try and find Nakoma, and _her_ family, if she has one. If she is not dead.

And Pocahontas will wear her hair loose, and dress plainly, for all she agrees to wear his people's clothes. For his part, John is simply glad to have his wife again.

The night before she leaves, she speaks to John Smith.

Then she kisses her son and his wife goodbye.

Smiles at John Smith.

Then she and her husband leave.

They never see her again.

...

She dictates a letter to her son and his young wife to her husband, who can barely write for tears. Then she asks him to carry her up to the deck.

She is so little in his arms. Too thin. A shadow of who she was, once upon a time.

As he picks her up she reaches under her pillow and pulls out a silken bag.

On the deck, the wind whips up a exultation of air. It twines around them, takes the breath away, roars up her hair into a blissful, wild tangle of darkness.

Pocahontas shuts her eyes, clutches at the object inside the silken bag, and smiles.


	42. Chapter 43

The ship comes back, and she has died on board, of some creeping carnivorous English disease, and is buried in England. At her funeral, the newly married Rolfes clutch at one another's hands, weeping. John Rolf can barely speak for tears. John Smith is silent. The wound in his side has festered. He does not have long to live.

The two men stand over the grave when all the other mourners have gone. They look at one another.

'She chose me.'

'Yes.'

A long silence.

'You should not have had her buried here.'

John Rolfe does not answer. He merely kneels by the grave, until the ailing man walks away.

Only now does John Smith cry. He lifts his face to the sky, allows the tears to come, cluster silently down his cheeks. Perhaps it would have been better to have never known her. Perhaps.

He goes to his empty house. Lies down on his bed. His wound pains him awfully.

The windows are open

…

John Rolfe kneels by the grave of his wife. Waters it with his tears. Finds an old skeleton of a leaf, placed there by a mourner. Soon it will rot, decompose, melt back into the earth.

He puts his wedding ring upon the soil. It will last longer than a mere leaf.

And he tries to forget how, when she was dead, he has reached to take her hands and found one clasped around the object in the blue silk bag. And he had pulled the fabric away, and seen it was nothing but a rusted compass, broken, glass cracked, ruined and wrecked and worthless.

She must have thought it was something else, he told himself, because she clung to it as though it was an object of salvation. He prized open her hand with shaking fingers and, barely upright with sobs, threw the compass overboard. Then he clutched up her body, and held her, and could not bear to let her go.

He prays to God to receive her soul.

…

John Smith stands. He walks, with halting steps, to the window.

That night she said goodbye.

In his chamber, both of them standing in a shallow pool of moonshine.

_He saved me, you see. And he has loved me all this time. And I cannot leave him now – not when he has given up as much for me as I gave up for him. _

_And he will give me peace instead of passion, and too much of too strong love can bruise, sometimes, and maybe if I hadn't lost you I could bear it. _

_But I need peace, now. And a sturdy, quiet husband. And I have to keep my promise to him, because I am a woman of honor, and I do love him, you see. He is…a tree. He shelters me. He is a grounding force. I may not be free, but I am safe. _

_And if I had gone with you I would not have been safe. If we sailed the world, I would have had freedom and adventure – but horrors, too. And sadness. And if we had gone to my people, I think the settlers would have attacked – it was only seeing me living among them that protected my people for this long from their swords and guns. _

_We would have had freedom. And we would have kept who we are. We would have had a love so strong and deep it wounded us, tattooed itself onto our bones, was more a part of us than our own blood. Free and wild and dangerous as the wind. _

_But this way – this life. It is better for my people. And it is peaceful. Perhaps the cost of happiness is always liberty. _

_But know that you gave me back myself. Helped me to remember who I am. Made me stronger, made me believe in myself once again. _

_I will forever and ever be your countryman. We have the same heart, the same blood. The same kind of soul, maybe. I will always be with you. As you will me. _

_I told you, once, that we used to walk to same path. That was once, long ago, and I hold by what I told you then – we do not walk the same path, now. _

She pressed a single, chaste kiss to his lips, walked away, opened the door –then turned to look at him, head tilted to one side, smiling that overpoweringly joyful, wild smile that is knitted into the aching tendons of his heart.

_But we are together in the wind. _

...

John Smith stands by the open window. A breeze gussets inside, whips around the room, laden with foreign leaves.

He listens.

He allows the wind to paint the world anew.

* * *

**I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has reviewed - i don't have much faith in my abilities and it means a lot to me that people enjoy what I write. I think 'Pocahontas fan' said they wanted to use a line in a story - if you genuinely do (and weren't just begin nice) i would be deeply deeply flattered. **

**Shameless plug! If you liked my style of writing I have written a story called 'the fall of snow' on fiction press. It's basically a retelling of snow white. **

**Anyway, thank you again! x **


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